We know that California is one of the most important musical centres in the US: such important composers as John Cage and Henry Cowell were from there, and such important popular genres as West Coast Jazz, LA metal and West Coast Hip Hop also originated there. To my knowledge, Californian music has been well represented in previous books, journal articles and web pages. However, Mina Yang says that California's ‘musical culture is still relegated to the margins in larger studies of American music’ (p. 2). She says that previous studies didn't properly look at Californian music's ‘multifaceted relationship with a racially and ethnically diverse population’ (p. 3). Thus, in this book Yang attempts to foreground various interrelations between music and race in California.
The book is indeed full of interesting discussions. One such discussion is found in Chapter 2, entitled ‘The Transpacific Gaze: Orientalism, Queerness, and Californian Experimentalism’. It is about the orientalism in Californian composers such as Cage, Cowell, Lou Harrison and Harry Partch. Yang says that orientalism was a common point of reference among them; they sought identity as Pacific experimentalists, by opposing those Atlantic experimentalists who had Europeanist tendencies. While characterising ‘their Asia’ as what they ‘imagined’ rather than what they saw, Yang shows some analyses of their pieces, such as Cowell's Ostinato Pianissimo, Cage and Harrison's Double Music and Harrison's First Concerto for Flute and Percussion, and suggests that these pieces should still be understood as being fundamentally orientalist because these were written as the composers’ positioning within a broader spectrum of American composers. Also pointing out that these composers were gay and acting against the dominant cultural values in every possible manner, Yang skilfully relates this case study to current issues in American musicology.
Another interesting discussion is found in Chapter 3, entitled ‘A Thin Blue Line Down Central Avenue: The LAPD and the Demise of a Musical Hub’. This details the brutality of the Los Angeles Police Department on Central Avenue, Los Angeles, which once ‘boasted glamorous nightclubs and swinging dance halls that rivalled the better-known African American music centers back east’ (p. 62). Yang reports that ‘jazz history was being made in the South Central ghetto of Los Angeles [i.e. Central Avenue] throughout the 1940s and early 1950s’ (p. 78), and lists the African American jazz musicians who played there during this period, including such star players as Howard McGhee, Charlie Parker, Sonny Criss, Teddy Edwards, Gene Montomery, Roy Porter and Dexter Gordon. But as Yang details, the LAPD Chief of that time, William Parker, made every effort to shut down Central Avenue, and he was successful. As a result, ‘[t]he brilliance on the Stem [a famous club on the Avenue] was extinguished before the rest of the world had a chance to admire it’ (p. 77). Today the story of the African American jazz of the West Coast is rarely related in the literature; ‘West Coast Jazz’ often means the cool jazz of white musicians who came there later. Yang thus lets us know that there was an untold music in the region.
The final chapter, entitled ‘After Sa-i-ku: Korean American Hip-Hop since the Rodney King Uprising’, offers yet another interesting discussion. The situation surrounding Korean immigrants in California is complex; they are ‘subject to the hostility of both the dominant culture (white) and the subordinate group (black)’ (p. 121). To elucidate the complexity, Yang contrasts Public Enemy's ‘Fight the Power’, which is about the fight between blacks and whites, with Ice Cube's ‘Black Korea’, which is about the strife between blacks and Koreans, and suggests the danger of reducing race relations to the black-and-white dichotomy. In fact, there is not only Korean–Black conflict, but also the rift between Korean Americans and other Asian Americans; after the 1992 LA riot ‘many non-Korean Asian Americans openly disassociated themselves from Koreans’ (p. 129). These complicated race relations and complicated issues on Korean American identities are discussed through further analysis of Korean American hip hop songs.
As informative and significant as each of these and the other chapters is, one might wonder: what exactly is the contribution of this book as a whole to the existing scholarship on American music? Yang says that Californian music is still relegated to the margins of American music studies, but there are many recent publications to deal with it as the central subject, as Yang herself admits (pp. 141–2, note 6). She also says that, to quote again, previous studies missed Californian music's ‘multifaceted relationship with a racially and ethnically diverse population’ (p. 3), but such a relationship has already been discussed at least partially by previous writers such as Deborah Wong and Ellie Hisama, as Yang herself knows well (p. 126). Yang also says, in her conclusion, that ‘debates surrounding race and culture are fluid, contingent on the specificities of a given historical moment and geographic location’ (p. 139), but that is too general a conclusion; everyone knows that a debate about something is fluid, contingent on the specificities of something. Even though the book ‘is not intended to be a survey of California music’ (p. 5), a sharper conclusion like that of a survey would kindly help us understand exactly what we should learn from this book.
Despite the lack of a sharper conclusion, the book does present many interesting discussions about the music of California. To the extent that this present reviewer has been urged to think about the contribution of this book, California Polyphony succeeds in convincing the reader of what is written in it. Perhaps someone, hopefully Yang herself, is expected to sort out these discussions in light of recent American music studies. Once such sort-out work is done, the significance of this book will become even more obvious than it is already.
